For Kate Beaton, what began hobby-like, as an online comic blog lampooning her favourite old novels and figures from history, very quickly took on a life of its own. So quickly, in fact, that she remembers precisely when the whole process of Hark! A Vagrant’s surprising journey into the broader world started.

“I was nobody, so I didn’t understand it,” recalled the Nova Scotia-born, Toronto-resident cartoonist by phone on the eve of a month-long promotional tour. “It was at the first (comics) convention I went to, in 2008, only a year after I started posting the blog. There was this big lineup of people, and it freaked me out. I saw a guy walking around with a T-shirt with my name on it. Getting a handle on all that took a while.”

She’s better with the attention these days, but then, she has had a lot of practice. Hark! A Vagrant, the 2011 book that gathered highlights from the eponymous blog, has often been called a surprise hit, but maybe its success – it made the New York Times bestseller list – should have been expected. From humble self-starter beginnings, Beaton had amassed a large and very devoted international following – currently at a million-plus online followers and counting – who were primed for a print version. Three years later a new volume is out, and there’s no reason to think Step Aside, Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection (Drawn & Quarterly, 160 pp, $24.95) won’t follow in its predecessor’s footsteps.

Ranging from Chopin to the Brontës to Alexander Graham Bell by way of Spider-Man, Wonder Woman and the must-be-seen-to-be-believed Strong Female Characters, the sequel’s subjects are treated in Beaton’s customarily irreverent, iconoclastic and sometimes riotously profane manner; one of her best tools is placing modern pop-speak in the mouths of decidedly non-modern figures. Looking for a common thread is probably a game for fools, but still, a grace-note of sympathy often shines through, which leads to a question: in choosing whom she’s going to skewer with her satire, does Beaton need to start from a seed of affection?

“I think so,” she said. “Yet sometimes I’ll make a comic about somebody who is a total reprobate, so the word in a case like that is not so much affection as interest. Generally, though, I don’t really care for mean humour. To me, what I do is more like picking on one of your best friends. You’re never cruel to them, but you rip them all the same.”

While the new book may not differ radically from the first, there are signs of an artist allowing herself a greater rein. One example, a longer-than-average instalment charting the sad-to-happy life arc of a minor fictional character from a 1986 Janet Jackson video, hints at the earned freedom of a writer/artist who doesn’t need to get her work past an editor. “It’s bizarre, and very long,” Beaton agreed of the hilarious Nasty. “But I had the idea and I thought it was funny so I ran with it.”

In a field that tends to draw obsessives, Beaton is a late-blooming outsider; the more typical cartoonist’s narrative is that of the comics nerd who grows up steeped in the form.

Kate Beaton’s characters range from Chopin to the Brontës to Spider-Man and Wonder Woman.

“Yeah, like a Seth character, a walking encyclopedia of comics,” she agreed. “It’s fascinating to talk to someone like him about that, because it just wasn’t my world. The town I’m from (Mabou, on Cape Breton) had no bookstore, no school library. There was very limited access to things. And I do think that in some ways that has been to my advantage. When I came on the scene, because I hadn’t gone through the same channels, what I made looked and sounded different.”

For all the early approbation, entry into the world of comics culture wasn’t completely smooth for Beaton, and a lot of that had to do with the simple fact of being a woman.

“In the beginning there was a lot of ‘You’re pretty funny for a girl.’ But I’m old now,” she chuckled. She’s 32. “I’m part of the furniture, so I don’t get singled out that way much anymore. Another thing is that in indie comics there are actually a lot of women, and we’ve all dealt with our share of b.s. So yes, it exists, but it’s not like I wake up thinking about it. But one thing that happens when you’re a woman in this nerd culture is that you’re dragged into questions about feminism and representation whether you like it or not.”

The drawing style in Beaton’s work can appear loose and spontaneous until you look a little more closely and begin to appreciate its elegance: with the most subtle of line variations she can leap from point to point on the emotional spectrum with seeming ease, showing a level of draftsmanship remarkable for an artist who is essentially self-taught.

“Well, thank you,” she said when presented with the compliment. “But trust me, there are a lot of things I can’t draw! Sometimes I do wish that I had some formal technical training. But if I had, I’m told, some of the strengths I have would have been downplayed and ironed out. Anyway, they never did look well on cartooning in Fine Arts at my school (Beaton attended Mount Allison University, graduating in 2005 with a BA in history and anthropology), so I don’t know if I would have excelled in that environment.”

Beaton’s interest in history, much of it Canadian, is long-standing, sparked partly by an especially good high school teacher, and partly by frequent exposure at an impressionable age to that oft-mocked standby of Canadian TV, the Heritage Minutes. “I really believe those have had a bigger impact than anybody used to think,” she said. “They’ve made our history very apparent and consumable, put characters and personalities in our minds.”

A strip titled Tom Longboat, from Step Aside, Pops.

One of the most striking things for many newcomers to Beaton’s work is its high and unapologetic quotient of Canada-specific content, presented matter-of-factly to a readership consisting mostly of non-Canadians. There’s something ineffably satisfying in the thought of, say, a Chilean reading and laughing at a strip lampooning Wolfe and Montcalm.

“Well, I do try to offer some context,” she said. “I hope people never feel I’m just handing them some smart-ass, know-it-all thing. But I also trust that the audience is smart. And the beauty of the Internet age is that if you’re not sure about something, you can just look it up.”

For Beaton, an unanticipated but clearly gratifying outgrowth of Hark!’s popularity has been its frequent use as an education tool in schools.

“It’s often tacked on professors’ doors,” she said, “and used in classroom presentations as a kind of icebreaker into a subject. ‘Today, class, we’re going to read Wuthering Heights, but first here’s this little comic.’ Then students can enter something already knowing that they can enjoy it. I also think that comics are an amazing mnemonic device. My comics are not necessarily accurate representations of an event or a book, but they will warm people up to the idea of thinking about it.”

A future Beaton project outside the bounds of Hark! might – she stresses she’s still not sure – be something based on an experience of ten years ago when, in common with so many fellow Maritimers, she sought work in the modern-day Wild West city of Fort McMurray. Ducks, a well-received stand-alone strip from last year, hints at what could grow into a full autobiographical work.

“I went (to Fort McMurray) after I got my education, coming out of that academic cloud where you think you’re important and then life comes crashing down on your head,” Beaton recalled. “Suddenly there I was in the oilfield, where there are fifty men for every woman in camp. But I’m glad to have been a small part of what is happening there, because I really believe that it’s the most important thing that’s happening in Canada right now. Ducks was a kind of a test for me, the start of an attempt to get some of the experience down before I start forgetting it. People who have lived there have told me things like ‘That is the first thing I’ve read set there that has really resonated with me.’ And that means a lot, because for a lot people (who haven’t lived there) it’s a shadow world – there’s no sense of people’s lives there.”

Beaton hasn’t lost touch with her roots – she’s doing this particular interview from a house near Mabou, a restorative change of pace from Toronto living and a possible precursor to an eventual permanent return. “Not everybody has the opportunity to move back here,” she said. “But I do.” Meanwhile, might her status as pop phenomenon mean a little less of her lamented need to keep repeating and explaining the name of the blog that made her famous?

“Oh, no. That will never end,” she laughed. “Even when you say it out loud, perfectly clear, people go ‘What?’ ”

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